As the population ages, it will be essential to understand all aspects of the retirement process of older individuals: career jobs, bridge jobs, self-employment, and labor force withdrawal. This proposal focuses on self-employment, investigating the prevalence of self-employment, the dynamics of self-employment, the impact of self-employment on economic welfare, and individuals' decisions to become and remain self-employed among older individuals in the United States and Germany. Our first Specific Aim is to analyze trends in the prevalence and composition of self-employment in both countries, developing age-, gender- , and ethnicity-specific self-employment rates that will permit us to identify trends in self-employment, changes in the composition of the self-employed population, and cross-national differences in the prevalence of self-employment. Our next Specific Aim is to analyze the dynamics of self-employment, computing age- and gender-specific transition rates to and from self-employment in each country using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, Health and Retirement Survey, and German Socio- Economic Panel. Our third Specific Aim links these patterns to economic status. We will compare the economic status of the self-employed with others of similar age, gender, and ethnicity. In addition, we will provide gender-specific, cross-national analyses of sources of income, focusing on the impact of transitions to and from self-employment on economic status. Our final Specific Aim is to provide gender-specific econometric analyses of the entry into and exit from self-employment for older workers, and- conditional upon self-employment status-estimates of the determinants of work hours and earnings. These estimates will permit us to quantify the impacts of individuals' age, health and disability status, earlier labor force experiences, and other socioeconomic characteristics on self- employment and economic well-being.